


winter soldier: mission override

by reggievass



Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel, Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: (the character death is falsely assumed), Angst, Body Modification, Brainwashing, Canonical Character Death, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Prosthesis, winter soldier - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-25
Updated: 2012-07-25
Packaged: 2017-11-10 17:41:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/468953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reggievass/pseuds/reggievass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is the mission and nothing else, and there never was anything but the mission.<br/>Only sometimes, he gets a thought hot in the cold like his twitching muscles, like the whisper in his ear, like the blood spray on his face:<br/>maybe it wasn’t always this way</p>
            </blockquote>





	winter soldier: mission override

He wakes up in the cold – Codename: Winter Soldier.

He wakes up in the cold, and there is his new name, here is his new mission coded plain in lines of type glowing green on black inside his head.

“You know it already. Don’t you, Winter Soldier?”

He thinks it is new, this name, this mission; he cannot know for sure.

It is not important.

There is the mission and nothing else, and there never was anything but the mission.

Only sometimes, he gets a thought hot in the cold like his twitching muscles, like the whisper in his ear, like the blood spray on his face:

maybe it wasn’t always this way

###

Steve sits at a café in Brooklyn, and it’s different.

“To the future,” Bucky said, but there’re no flying cars here, not yet.

It’s different, but it’s also the same.

It’s the same in the way all cities feel familiar, in the hustle bustle, in the to and fro. Same in the way London, Paris, felt a little bit like home, the way Bucky whispered Berlin would, but they never got that far.

Bucky with an arm around Steve’s shoulder.

Bucky leading a cheer.

“Let’s hear it for Captain America.”

Steve thinks he should feel a phantom chill at the lack of a hand at his back. Seems wrong how his skin runs hot these days as if the snow, the ghosts don’t matter while he sits alone in a café of the future flipping through files of people he knew.

He thought they’d all be dead, but they’re not. Seems people live longer these days. Soldiers he knew live sprinkled around the States reminding him of his tour selling bonds a few years back, a few decades.

Steve considers visiting his men, but it seems kinder not to; to let them live with their memories, their bravery, their ideals intact; not to slap their aged faces with his youth.

Besides, right now, there’s nothing out there he wants to see, nothing he wants from a future of sitting alone beside an empty chair, nothing he needs but a fight.

Steve’s still public-spirited-soldier enough not to loose his mood on weary veterans.

He stays in the café reading files, in the basement throwing punches, in the apartment they gave him drawing pictures of his dead.

Steve stays and he waits for something that calls to him like the arm missing from around his shoulders, like the hand no longer at his back.

Steve stays and he waits for the reason he woke.

###

He wakes up, and it is not so cold this time, but still there is the mission.

Always already in his head.

“The mission, Winter Soldier.”

He does not remember waking up before, but it is in the metal of his arm, in his expectation of snow no longer on the ground, that he must have. Once there must have been a first time when he woke with a mission, but he cannot remember. He cannot know for sure.

“It is not important.”

He has American English in his mouth and a United States target.

The tones roll around his tongue the way no other language ever has, no other language he can recall.

But still, his voice is not his own. His mouth is a speaker playing phrases he did not record above a residue of voices laid down before.

He ignores the whispers, because they are not important.

He suits up. He flies out.

###

Steve stares at a sand-scattered floor, at broken punching bags, at knuckles that heal too quickly.

The itchy anger pounds in his blood, that heat that buzzes, that’s been there since he rose from drowning, since he opened his eyes from ice, since he ran out onto the street, into the future.

He thought the fight would quench it.

But if he came for the fight, the burn would be sated now, fortune appeased because he had it. He and the rest of the Avengers Initiative, they fought for their world and won.

But Steve’s shoulders are still too warm, and his hands ache.

He rides off alone on his motorcycle, trying to shake the feel of Fury’s eye, and his hands ache for another punch.

He rides off alone, off out of New York, out to a land of dying soldiers.

He rides off alone and tells himself it must have always been this way, that sleeping made him forget the lonely fight tattooed beneath his skin.

But he can’t make himself believe it, because Steve remembers being a boy, a man, who didn’t want to kill anyone.

He doesn’t have to wonder when that man died, and it was before he made the suicide play.

He still hears a whisper in his ear. “To the future.”

And how many years is it now that Bucky’s been gone?

###

He is awake in some Midwest state.

On the ground an instant and already the name of the place is gone, not important.

“The mission, Winter Soldier.” He can hear it in his head, but no one is talking.

He is tailing a target now, does not know why.

He is at a rest stop in a state whose name he forgot tailing a target, and he does not need to know why.

“Bucky?” someone says low, quiet, almost a gasp lost in the passing static of conversations, but Codename: Winter Soldier, he hears everything.

It is not important. It is just noise, a whisper; someone talking at a rest stop should not concern him at all. The mission is –

“Bucky,” the voice is all he can hear, but it is the wrong voice because it is not telling him what to do.

It is strange and familiar all at once.

He gives away the hidden strength of his arm when he converts a ceramic mug to shards in his gloved palm. Sloppy.

It would not do to draw the target’s attention just yet. Too many witnesses.

He cannot take anyone out here.

He scans the area.

Someone is staring back. A blonde man, twenties, too handsome, clean cut, plaid shirt, leather jacket, khaki pants.

“Bucky?” the voice comes from the man’s mouth, and he is right there.

The man is holding his arm, talking in his face, and he does not know when the man got there, seconds gone in a glitch.

But this is nothing like erasing outdated memories; this is more like the opposite, like restoring files he had not known were deleted, filling in places he hadn’t known were empty.

There is a phantom feeling in his missing arm ignorant of mechanics or nerve endings, a roving heat beneath skin he no longer has.

“The mission, Winter Soldier.” But the voice is fading out, covered by the one right here, right now, right real in front of him.

He always has an itchy anger these days, but this feeling does not tell him to close his metal fist and break a jaw, this heat, this hand, this tug tells him –

“Bucky.”

So he grabs the other man by his leather jacket, drags him half on the table in the midst of shattered ceramic and cooling coffee.

He holds this stranger away from him, close to him, hard to tell which at arm’s length, and he doesn’t know why.

He doesn’t need to know why, because just now, this overrides every mission protocol.

This clean-cut cowboy at a Colorado rest stop with the face he shouldn’t know, but does anyway.

“Steve,” someone says, and oh.

That’s his voice, isn’t it?

His voice rough, unsure and strangely relieved as it twists one word, one name, into the failsafe to reboot all systems.

He realizes he forgot what he sounded like before.

He realizes there was a before to be forgot.

the mission, winter soldier

the mission is fading fast

###

“Bucky,” Steve breathes the name out again and never wants to stop saying it, realizes he never has, not really, never stopped thinking it.

He breathes, and it feels like the first breath since the future, since the ice, since the train.

“I thought you were dead,” Steve says.

He says it because he can’t think of anything else, because it’s symmetrical, and because it’s true.

Because he’s still running hot with the remembered warmth of blood spray on his face, sweat on his twitching muscles, the hand he never shook from his shoulder.

Bucky blinks.

His eyes flit over Steve’s face, and it’s like nothing so much as the time Steve lifted him up off of Zola’s table for all that Bucky’s the one doing the lifting now.

Bucky says, “I thought…”

And Steve’s skin finally cools beneath a metal palm.

The whisper in his ear continues, but it’s all right now because Bucky’s alive to be whispering.

“I thought of you.”


End file.
